The management of digital content is an increasing concern in all areas of the preparation of digital content for presentation, and particularly in the electronic publishing industry. The explosive growth of electronic publishing, including both print and multi-media applications, along with the availability of numerous types of media has created extensive problems in the management of the digital content created for these publications.
This content can be expensive to create or acquire. There also may be legal titles and copyrights involved in the individual digital content which must be accounted for as well. Thus, the reusability of digital content is an important concern in electronic publishing.
This digital content, often referred to as “assets”, may be in numerous different forms, such as text files, graphic files, audio files, video files, executable files, such as multimedia presentations, and many other types. Also, within each type of file (text, graphic, etc.), the file may even be in different formats, such as a graphic file could be in JPEG, TIFF, BMP, or many other formats. The management of the multitude of differing file types is an important need in the growing cross-media publishing industry where documents are being created for the print industry, the Internet and other multi-media presentations.
The ability to manage digital assets has become critical, not only in the electronic publishing industry, but in other document management operations, such as within company operations including human resources, legal, accounting departments. The electronic publishing industry in particular, has critical concerns with the management of digital assets used in creating the content for multi-media publications, including print, multi-media recordings, Web documents, not only for Internet use but for Intranet and other networked environments, and other types of multi-media presentations. Once the digital asset is created, it is necessary for that asset to be securely stored and indexed in a fashion that allows it to be easily retrieved. The asset also must be maintained to ensure that any revisions to the asset are only done in an authorized manner.
Organizations, particularly in the publishing industry, are often geographically separated. There may be offices needing to pool resources that are separated by great distances. The transfer of resources between these offices frequently create many problems in tracking the digital assets.
A number of applications have attempted to address some of these issues. Examples of these systems include MediaSphere from Cascade, Inc., Cumulus from Canto Software and Media Vault from EDS. These systems fail to adequately frilly address the issues discussed above.
For example, these applications do not support specific content-related functionality. Such content-related features include the ability to generate low-resolution thumbnail images from high-resolution data, to easily elaborate different multimedia objects generated in different computer formats or to manage individually stored digital content in a single multimedia document. Computer formats to be supported by an asset management technology should be those commonly used by users, such as Microsoft Word, the QuarkXPress or the QuarkCopyDesk file formats.
The prior applications also do not allow the user to customize the search queries for digital assets stored within the system. Also, these prior applications do not allow the user to customize the display of the results of the search queries in order to optimize the search routines. The prior applications fail to create and maintain relationships between assets which have been checked into the operations of the application. These applications also fail to organize the assets and their attributes in manner that allows optimum use of the assets.
The prior applications fail to provide a distributed architecture to balance the load and usage of the digital assets between different locations in an efficient and optimal manner. The prior applications fail to allow for local storage of the assets at high-usage locations while still maintaining central control of the assets and their use. The prior applications also fail to provide the capability to automate many of the tasks necessary to organize the assets.
There presently is a need for an application that can efficiently and comprehensive manage these digital assets.